Best 123 quotes in «surveillance quotes» category

Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.

Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

Moreover, it is clear that the era of the information bomb, the era of aerial warfare, the era of the RMA and global surveillance is also the era of the integral accident.

The best proof of the high quality of American beef is the continued negative BSE findings supported by the highest surveillance possible. The administration should be working to increase our surveillance of BSE, not scaling it back.

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

We should not be comfortable or content in a society where the only way to remain free of surveillance and repression is if we make ourselves as unthreatning, passive, and compliant as possible.

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.

When the New York Times revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

We've seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They've become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they've lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.

All great ideas, all great leaps of progress, all have a wake of sacrificial bodies.

A friend once told me a story about a former Black Panther leader in a Midwest community who in the 1960s had his phone tapped, while federal agents followed him everywhere. Forced to go underground, he later entered the drug trade & eventually got good at it. However, he told my friend, soon after this nobody kept tabs on him--he wasn't followed or harassed. He later became the number one drug dealer in the area. As he said this, my friend noted a breaking in his voice; the pain, perhaps, of being pushed away from being a committed community activist.

Americans don't care about privacy, and the people running the country couldn't be happier.

Allow yourself to fall, giving up the effort to learn how to fly, knowing someone will be there to catch you.

A man’s ability to give is dwarfed by his ability to take. Those who profit by fulfilling man’s need to take by giving will be the most powerful on earth.

A note on language. Be even more suspicious than I was just telling you to be, of all those who employ the term "we" or "us" without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that "we" are all agreed on "our" interests and identity. Populist authoritarians try to slip it past you; so do some kinds of literary critics ("our sensibilities are enraged...") Always ask who this "we" is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs. An absurd but sinister figure named Ron "Maulana" Karenga—the man who gave us Ebonics and Kwanzaa and much folkloric nationalist piffle—once ran a political cult called "US." Its slogan—oddly catchy as well as illiterate—was "Wherever US is, We are." It turned out to be covertly financed by the FBI, though that's not the whole point of the story. Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

And when they spy on us let them discover us loving

Here’s the thing you need to know about surveillance: it’s boring. Sure, sometimes we blow stuff up and jump off buildings and/or moving trains, but most of the time we just hang around waiting for something to happen (a fact that almost never makes it into the movies), so I might have felt pretty silly if I were a normal girl and not a highly trained secret-agent-type person as I sat on that park bench, trying to act normal when, by definition, I’m anything but.

As the flag of power ascends, it will oppress the masses and enslave its masters. Freedom will fail and the world will be razed to ruin, no matter how honorable the intentions of those in power might have been. It is the inevitable outcome, because the individual is not perfect and, as such, the world will never be.

Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.

Don't oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists and all of the other people our liberty relies on.

Dragnet surveillance capitalists such as Facebook, Comcast, AT&T and Google, unfortunately, supply these manipulating forces with an endless supply of metadata for this information war against the American and European public.

Each government will eventually need to feed on each other when they have sucked their populations dry. And in so doing, will destroy the world one war, one treaty, one negotiation at a time.

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

Dean Rolfe squirmed, coughed, and looked everywhere except in Frank’s eyes. To do what was fraught with legal ramifications. These were the words he had carefully avoided, the hidden croutons in his carefully prepared word salad. “To give you the reach to keep tabs on certain people, no matter where they go. You know . . . a surveillance system.

Destruction of privacy via surveillance programs engineered by Great Powers widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling elite and everyone else. Its impact on global south will be colossal.

Do not lament the suffering we have to endure to fulfill the dream but rejoice in the courage with which we will face it.

Es soll keine Geheimnisse mehr geben, sagen die neuen Überwachungstheoretiker und meinen damit etwas recht Interessantes: dass die Ära, in der Geheimnisse zählten, in der Geheimnisse ihre Macht über das Leben von menschen ausüben konnten [...], vorbei ist; nicht, was sich zu wissen lohnt, kann nicht innerhalb von Sekunden und ohne großen Aufwand aufgedeckt werden; das Privatleben ist im Grunde ein Ding der Vergangenheit.

Eventually we’ll all be living comfortably and provided for, even if caged like a poor zoo animal.

Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as "What is the most significant story that you have revealed?" […] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is–and I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama; it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative; it is literally true–that the goal of the NSA and it's five eyes partners in the English speaking world–Canada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK–is to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that there could be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net; they want to make sure that all forms of human communications by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies. That means, to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state; you don't need hyperbole to make that claim, and you do not need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little premise of the planet where some form of communications might take place without they being able to invade it.

His eyes touched lightly, and passed on.

I find it very concerning that a utility company that has an established history of harassing me has my family under surveillance with a Smart/AMR/AMI meter.

However, this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the Government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules—a veritable Catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.

If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power ... [T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard ... Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just." [opposing the Alien & Sedition bills of 1798, in Congress]

In Soviet Russia, maybe we could only have cars all the same color, but at least our women weren't sluts and no one did any drugs, I think.

If you lust for power, she will swallow you in an instant and make you her servant.

I look at the world around me and I see that many of Adolf Hitlers dreams have come true: Weapons of mass destruction, huge rockets, surveillance of the masses, world domination, mistreatment of the poor, sick and elderly, to name just a few.

I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders. ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.

In truth, we were similar. Like two sides of a fan, we were at odds with each other, we competed with each other, but our fates similarly rested in the hands of the Emperor--the holder, the commander, the manipulator of our destinies.

In the era of surveillance of the masses, I like to use phrases like terrorists, assassinate, bomb, explosions, attack, weapons of mass destruction, and so on in my on-line activities to screw up the automated government surveillance software.

It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time, open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy. That’s why, even at the height of the Cold War, when the argument for absolute secrecy was at its zenith, Congress chose to make US surveillance laws public. Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate. And when the American people are in the dark, they can’t make fully informed decisions about who should represent them, or protest policies that they disagree with. These are fundamentals. It’s Civics 101. And secret law violates those basic principles. It has no place in America.

I once saw a note on a Stasi file from early 1989 that I would never forget. In it a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact that there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations that they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them.

I wonder how it worked inside the Stasi: who thought up these blackmail schemes? Did they send them up the line for approval? Did pieces of paper come back initialled and stamped 'Approved': the ruining of a marriage, the destruction of a career, the imprisonment of a wife, the abandonment of a child? Did they circulate internal updates: 'Five new and different ways to break a heart'?

It seems whenever the government doesn’t want anyone to know something, it is all of a sudden critical to national security.

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.

Not enough people know or understand just how little freedom we have left.